


A Blind Man's Profession

by rustyshiv



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: AU kind of, Johnlock but it's super clean almost, M/M, Painting, Sherlock paints, artist, first fanfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-28
Updated: 2013-11-28
Packaged: 2018-01-02 22:00:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1062120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rustyshiv/pseuds/rustyshiv
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>He sweeps the paint, I feel him try to make it life-like. 
Brings the brush back. 
Tomorrow, maybe he’ll paint my ears, and I shall hear him. I shall hear the instrument that vibrates so viciously, and hear the music I have only been able to feel through hums and vibrations. 
And later, he shall paint my eyes, and I shall behold the man I’ve fallen in love with.</em>
</p><p>"Painting is a blind man's profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels." - Picasso</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Blind Man's Profession

**Author's Note:**

> This was inspired by fanart of Sherlock being kissed by a painted John, and I felt like I had to write that story. I don't know who painted it, and I'm sure my writing isn't enough to do that drawing justice (because holy cow that was good fanart), but I tried.

The nightmares are grey.

It bothers the Artist. Grey is not a colour. To a man who relies on colour, who feeds off it like a sycophantic parasite, grey is death. Grey matter to some signals the life pulse of men, , the symbol of knowledge. To the Artist, grey is the pallor of dead men buried six feet, meal for worms. It is the draining of energy from a body. Leech, always a leech.

Grey is what’s left after the sun melts and the oceans dry up and the world stops spinning. His apocalypse.

Grey is his dream. There is no colour in his dream, just a monotonous charcoal. But charcoal is a colour; it’s a colour he uses. So that’s not right either.

He falls in this dream. Always falling. And there is never a floor, or an ocean, or something to catch him. He falls, and it’s endless, and it scares him because he does not know how to respond in the dream. When he wakes, he gasps and breathes and sobs and reminds himself that he is alive, and that his world is an exploding cacophonous canvas, and he stands and lays down and sits and _hardly ever falls_.

Today, it snows outside. Snow is fine. The Artist likes snow. It’s an emptiness that allows for the most vibrant shocks of colour- there’s the red of cardinals and the blue of the sky and the black of ravens. But this snow reminds him of the dreams. This snow is too shallow for it to be the white he prefers, the white he needs. It’s a grey sludge, worn by shoes and cars and made into a slate colour that he despises. Nausea brings up bile. The bile is yellow, and brown, and some acrid smell that rises stings his eyes.

The grey seeps out of his subconscious, and has made it into his real world. It’s sapping life. It’s sapping energy.

The Artist needs to paint.

* * *

 

_There’s nothing._

_It’s so cold._

_Even the white of my own skin is off-white. I am nothing, nothing yet._

_I need to be touched, cherished. I need to be_

_Painted_

* * *

_   
_

It is not hard to decide what to paint.

The Artist has always been lonely. People don’t understand the necessities of colour. They aren’t as in tuned with the shades and the calls and the symphonies of a well blended rosy hue against the deepest emerald. They don’t understand; and that scares him. It scares them, but he scares them, so he does not know what truly frightens them. The painting or the Artist.

He decides to paint a companion. He needs to paint a companion.

The personality is always hardest. He must make this companion, this _friend_ , someone who can love him and need him. Someone who can feed off of the Artist’s love as much as the Artist will feed on his.

The colours he chooses, oh _such_ colours. It’s winter, and there’s white and there’s black and there’s monotony. Where once he enjoyed the starkness of winter, he know detests it. He wants his companion to be warm; he wants heat, and sun, and tan, and love.

He picks out the pinks and the browns and the greens and the blues and the yellows of the background. He blends, and inspects, and bites into his lip in the deepest concentration until he tastes copper. The red copper of his lifeblood. _Copper red_ , that’s the colour that’s missing.

It is a dance, a waltz or a Charleston or a tango of vivid emotions and details and he can _hear_ every colour emanating its own music until its a dull roar of Bach’s Cacchone. He can play Bach on his violin, the mahogany and red hues of his violin that contrast deliciously against the green of the throw on the armchair- a deep obsidian and metal armchair that has housed so many paintings and has never had anyone sit on it.

It is not enough. He flourishes, he turns in circles, mumbling to himself. He has to let go of the colours, of his brush, of his towel, and pick up his instrument. Music is colour, colours are music. He _must_ find the perfect blend of symphonic noise to merge in the background. He _must_.

He will. He does. He shouts in jubilation and proceeds to blend, and merge, and mix, and lovingly tease the colours into many shades of lust and joy and heat and orgasmic delight. Yes, _yes_ , he feels it.

He finds his colours.

He dips his brush.

He paints.

 

* * *

 

_It tickles._

_It teases._

_It whispers a breath of promise, a kiss made vow._

_I can feel it, brushing against me._

_I could shout in jubilation, if I had a mouth._

_Not yet. Not just yet._

* * *

 

The Artist, clever man that he is, decides to brush out summer. Heat, sweat, swims in lakes and rivers, wild children running in fields, warm gusts of air caressing dandelions, lovers undulating on a bed, all these things are the blues and the reds of the background.

It starts out dissonant.

Angry, almost, the way the brush paints. Vigorously, as if it is painting against a timeline. His Chaccone turns into something vicious, something loud. The Overture of 1812.

He is fighting against the grey outside the window, and the grey inside his mind.

He knows his friend will understand. His friend will also be afraid of the grey.

 

It is when the background is finished that he notices he’s made a landscape. Too close to resemble anywhere concrete, but it is definitely a location. It is too tan, the tawny colour of hawks’ wings that fly in the Middle East.

The Middle East is heat. It is summer always in the Middle East.

There are red streaks going across the canvas. Places that his enthused brush touched that left blood marks. There is blue, the blue of the sky that is obscure minutely by the tawny sands of the Middle East. Should he add white? A slight wisp of cloud, maybe? Yes, he decides to add a thin white line at the top left hand corner. It now looks like the skies of the Sistine Chapel, housing angels and cherubims and maybe nephilim.

He scowls. He does not want his companion to be housed in the Sistine Chapel, he wants him to be housed in an endless summer. To be where the Artist cannot be. London is never hot enough to be the summer he so desires.

He paints on.

 

* * *

 

_I feel the urgency of his brush, the love portrayed in every harsh stroke and every tender brush against surface._

_I have yet to see him. I cannot hear him. I cannot smell him._

_I know it’s a man painting me. The way he holds his brush, the way that he strokes, urgent and chaotic and needy and so full of love and longing, it is a man._

_I want him to brush and stroke and touch me. He hasn’t yet. He has yet to touch me with his skin. He touches me with his brush, kisses me with the horsehair fibres and brings me to delight with the fierce press of each hair on my slightly rough surface. He needs to touch me, I need to feel him. If his brush can bring me to such raptures, oh what could his touch do?_

_I need to-_

_To feel his fingertips, to feel his caress._

_I want to feel his-_

* * *

 

He wants to make his friend the opposite of him. He makes him a man. Men are much easier to paint, for him. He knows that makes him odd, to the people that know him. He does not care, and paints the men anyway.

This man, his friend, he must make with utmost care. The opposite of him is short where he is tall, and brown where he is wan, and gold where he is obsidian, and enjoys people. People would understand him where they cannot understand the Artist, and talk to him where they would scorn the Artist. And after all this, he would come back to his Artist and remind him how to breathe and stand and sit, he would be there to catch him as he falls and he would banish the white-noise grey.

The Artist has to take the utmost care with this man.

He shall paint a soldier. Not because it is the Middle East, but because he is not brave enough to be one. Soldiers are selfless and kind and always banish night terrors. He cannot, and is not, and will not. The soldier-friend is more a man than the Artist will ever be, just for that fact alone. The Artist does not stop there. He will make the soldier-friend a doctor. Because doctors heal, and protect, and comfort. And the Artist has never had a healer, or protector, or comforter before. And he has never had a selfless soldier fighting the front lines of the grey sea of dreams.

There _are no colours for his friend_. He is frustrated, and angry, and he grabs the nearest thing he can pick up- mug of tea, he made it without realizing that he cannot rip open the bag first and seep the leaves without the bag- and heaves it against the wall. The splash is golden red. Little flecks of brown and green- the leaves that were part of the ripped bag, dot the surface.

_How how how can he find colours if no colours are willing to mix right?_

He plays, angrily, atonally, and heaves breaths. In and out, in and out, hyperventilating slightly. He throws the violin down, a crazed version of Vivaldi’s Summer ending on a pitched wail- and isn’t it ironic he can _play_ Summer but he _cannot paint summer?_

The soldier-friend is golden, he is light and sun and warmth, and he must make him kind yet stern. Approachable yet dominant. Oh how difficult it has all become!

He grabs his browns, he grabs his yellows, and his reds, and his whites. He must make a shade that is suitable for his soldier-friend.

He throws that away. Too stringent.

He plays Summer, again. More viciously, until he has to yank the torn fibres from his bow and replace broken strings and rosin again.

He mixes more yellow this time, less brown. A bit of white, some red.

It looks like the colour of his bile from this morning.

He starts gently, but no less angrily, playing Winter. Vivaldi shall do, for now. He’d prefer the crass and the bravery of Bach, but Vivaldi shall do. He is painting a season, after all. A season encapsulated by a single man.

Oh how difficult, indeed!

Winter reminds him of the white, the white that is today slate grey from the trodding of shoes and tyres against the kerb. He huffs angrily and throws aside his violin. He must think. He must meditate. He must…

No, he cannot.

He cannot think with the aides. The aides bring the dreams. And yet, they make him think so clearly. They make him see so many colours.

The Artist reaches for the vials, for the needles. A different type of brush, perhaps, but no less elegant. A different type of painting, but no less effulgent.

 

* * *

 

_He is gone._

_Where once was vigor, and urgency, now there is… nothing._

_No sensation, no brush strokes or lashings with the fibres._

_There is emptiness, and silence that I cannot hear but feel._

_My Artist has forgotten me._

_I have not touched him yet._

_And now, maybe I never shall._

* * *

 

 

It is three months later that the Artist returns to his soldier-friend. The snow from that day, so long ago, had been made deeper, and was white again. He saw yet again the stark contrasts of blues and reds and yellows and the blacks of the ravens.

But the slate grey is back, seeping out of his subconscious and into his world, and he needs his summer embodied.

He must pick a hue, today.

His brush, his towel, his water, and the Sistine Chapel pastel war background. Looking at it now, the red slash he made, almost vibrant against the pastel, is a wound. He could make it a wound. It is not quite in the center, a bit to the left. The Middle East has a war going on, and his friend is a soldier. A wound makes all the more sense. He is proud of his line of thinking and begins to draw out with his pencil the lines of the body.

Many artists he knows or read about start with faces. He cannot, and does not, and will not ever start with a face. The face is the gatekeeper to the emotions. The eyes, a soul. Faces are of utmost importance, and best kept until last.

Once he is secured in his body- stocky, he must be stocky where the Artist is lanky, he shapes the head, and the hands and soon there is a body. Or, half of a body. It ends at the waist, and he curses himself for not buying a bigger canvas, a full sized one that can fit an entire human body fit to scale.

Now for the colours. He has bought new strings, and has fitted his bow with new fibres, and has rosined both. He is ready for the madness that will ensue.

It does not come.

Instead, the colours come. He shouts in jubilation, again and again, and cries slightly for his good fortune. It is such a lovely shade of tan, such a lovely shade of skin. This shade, this hue, this _perfect_ alteration of light molecules reflecting off the atmos, _this shade is soldier-friend_. This is encompassing sunlight where the Artist is ethereal moonlight.

He dips his brush in, shaking softly, biting his lips hard, and brings a hand to the canvas. He feels it. The energy, white-hot and tingling and filling him up completely. He sees it, reflecting off the Sistine Chapel pastel and the angry brush of red, the shoulder wound that almost took him away from earth, and brought him to London, he _hears_ it. It’s the quintessential climax of the most alluring opus. Every instrument can be heard, and he laughs out loud, giddy and breathless, and feeling almost childlike. He knows it’s silly, he knows that the people who are frightened by him cannot understand and would probably laugh, but he cannot bring himself to care. He has found the sun, he has found air after suffocating, he has found a cold glass of water after running endlessly for miles.

He has found- dare he think it? Dare he say it?

He has found something stronger and more potent than the aides, than the needles, and the vials. He has found his champion against the grey. He has found his friend, his companion, his soul mate. He has found the colour of _skin_.

  
  
  


* * *

 

_There it is._

_I feel like shouting, crying, whooping praises and prayers and exultations and dancing and singing._

_I cannot do any of these things; I am a canvas, but he can, and he is and he will. I feel his energy, even if I cannot see or hear him. I feel him, and he tingles and vibrates and shakes out of joy._

_His brush is touching me again. I feel the life flow into my painted veins._

_The Artist paints an arm, and a body, and another arm, and a neck, and we spend hours together. This dance of give-and-take, this tango of emotions and colour and expressions. He paints, and I inflate to life with the love he pours out of his fingertips. He moulds, and creates, and breathes, and moves, and I can feel everything._

_There they are again- the raptures. He is touching. He is caressing._

_It is not his brush, he is touching my neck, the neck that he moulded out of the history and the vision of hundreds of other necks, and he touches reverently. He sweeps the paint, I feel him try to make it life-like._

_Brings the brush back._

_Tomorrow, maybe he’ll paint my ears, and I shall hear him. I shall hear the instrument that vibrates so viciously, and hear the music I have only been able to feel through hums and vibrations._

_And later, he shall paint my eyes, and I shall behold the man I’ve fallen in love with._

* * *

 

It is many hours later, the Artist thinks it must be a day later, that he stops and sees. His face remains unpainted, but he is there. His soldier-friend.

The Artist has not painted him in uniform. He refuses to accept that his friend is anywhere but at home, with him, so he has painted him in a jumper. It is winter, after all, even if he himself is summer embodied. His jeans, barely visible because the canvas cuts off, are dark. Almost black denim. Each scratch with the end of his brush to achieve that _look_ of denim was worth it- it’s so lifelike. His jumper is the Scottish fisherwoman’s knit. A simple, tasteful oatmeal colour. His friend is frugal where the Artist likes to splurge.

His jumper obscures the entrance of the wound, but the red splashes out from behind him. A reminder, for both of them. At this thought he frowns. Should he have made him suffer so? What did the Artist achieve with getting his only friend in the world, his comforter and protector and dream-chaser, what could he possibly hope to achieve by hurting him?

Anger surges through him. How could he be so cruel? A brief thought flits through his mind, of throwing his work away, of burning the painting because of the unnecessary suffering of his friend. But then he thinks of the _skin_ , of the oatmeal, of the denim, of his Sistine Chapel war summer.

A new anger courses through him, an anger at himself for even thinking that he could desert his soldier-friend, and simultaneously invite his dreams to come back. He is sorry, and he says so a thousand times to the painting, but he cannot bear falling. He cannot bear grey. He cannot.

 

Ears are a very specific thing. Make ears too big, and he looks disproportionate. Too small, and he looks disproportionate.

His soldier-friend, and the Artist really needs to think of a name, has _perfect_ ears. They are detailed, and specific, and _just so_ on his head.

The hair is another matter. He needs every strand to be different. Every root, shaft, and tip, every cuticle, cortex and medulla- he needs them to be precise and detailed.

This is another thing the Artist wants different to him. Where the Artist is wan and ethereal and pale, his friend is summer and warmth. It would not do to give him the same head of hair the Artist has, dark and unruly and long. He is a soldier, and a doctor. He is clean, straight lines and precision.

Flaxen hair, short and straight and yet slightly grown out. He hasn’t been in the war lately, he’s been here at home. It’s every shade of gold that he can think of. The sun from above that the Artist has hinted at hits it and makes it almost white with resplendence. The parts that aren’t hit directly by sunlight are the orange yellow dusky colour of the sun setting over waves, of the halo of an angel- the angels flying over the Sistine Chapel, it is the gold of the finest temple in the world.

His soldier-friend is touched by sunlight. He radiates it, he creates it, he breathes in and expels it and surrounds himself in it. A photosynthesis of warmth. He is the sun. He is the Artist’s sun.

The Artist weeps freely now. He has finally found the warmth, after years of murderous grey. Grey that ate away at his sanity, grey that dragged him down to an inky abyss. He has found his angel, his protector against death. And it feels better than anything that he has ever felt before.

 

* * *

 

_I have ears now. His voice._

_It’s deep. And dark. And broken. He is cold, and harsh like any bleak landscape or slap across the face. But inside, he is searching for something. Something that can help him. I feel it, because he is always so close to me. Just a brush away from touching, and sometimes he does do that, touch me. And I feel his sorrow. I cannot yet see it._

_But I can hear it._

_His voice is so deep and dark and rich, and the music that he plays is sad and searching and weary. But he is beautiful. And he praises me so! He calls me his soldier-friend. I know that I am. A soldier, that is. I have a wound in my shoulder and he is breathing life and memories and they hurt sometimes, the memories. Memories of gunfire and death and blood; of women screaming and men crying. They scare me, but now I have him._

_He calls me his friend._

_I can hear him when he says that._

_And I love him._

_I wonder often if he loves me._

* * *

 

 

The Artist names him John.

He cannot say why, but John came to him as he was falling. He was shouting the name, and it was the first burst of sound and colour in his dreams. He shouted for John and the red of his soldier-friend’s gunshot wound danced across his vision, and the Sistine Chapel pastel war background burst through the seams, and he heard warm laughter in place of crushing silence.

So he names his soldier-friend John.

“Your name is John,” he tells the painting, and then feels silly for doing it. He looks closely, and feels as if the painting has moved. In fact, he is certain of it. He did not paint that arm to be crooked like that. It is miniscule, but the Artist can tell. He knows paintings can’t move. He doesn’t question that maybe he is over-thinking.

Today is the day that he paints the face.

The Artist plays his violin as he thinks of the shade he wants to paint the eyes. How deep he wants them, how sad or happy, how pensive and intelligent. He wants John to have a soul, and his eyes are the most important piece.

He brings his brush and paints, humming something he composed under his breath. He cannot think of anything but the brush, small and tapered. John’s lips are thin, and pink, but they suit his smaller face. Unlike the Artist’s lips, he reminds himself. The Artist has thick, full, Cupid’s bow lips. John’s are thinner and pink and turned up in a pensive smile. Just observing.

He wonders…

No, John isn’t real. He couldn’t ever.

He tries not to think about the sorrow that engulfs his heart as he thinks that maybe, painting a friend was the worst decision he ever made. He can never touch the painting. And the painting will never call him friend. And the Artist will never know what those thinner, pink lips might’ve-

 

* * *

 

_I cannot just yet._

_Souls aren’t in lips._

_Soon, though._

_Soon._

* * *

 

 

The face is complete. The Artist thinks he made it look smart without being presumptuous like he knows he is, and it might be a bit weathered and worn from the war. But the lines around the eyes, the eyes he has yet to paint, are crinkled as if he’s laughing with his eyes. Tired, and wizened from the world and wise beyond his years- the Artist thinks he drew a man in his late thirties- but John is happy. He’s relieved and happy.

The Artist is selfish enough to believe he put those crinkles there, and that smile there. He is, but he wants to believe John is more than a painting. That he put them there because John reacted to a joke, or something that the Artist did.

He feels himself cross that line.

Painting John couldn’t be a mistake.

But loving John? How can he contend with that irrepressible sadness and unrequited love for a painting?

Blue. Blue is what his eyes are going to be.

The Artist feels the weight of the world crush him, a failure of an Atlas, and begins to breathe heavily. The color blue, azure, cyan, cobalt, cerulean, is so difficult.

It’s the color of water, of sky, of pain, of joy, of flowers and the pallid blue of death, it is the most dichotomous color he can think of. It is life, more than death. And he cannot leave John’s eyes, the windows to his very soul, to a haphazard mix and blend of just plain blues.

* * *

_The Artist is getting ready._

_I am getting ready. I have moved more times than I can possibly count. Minor twitches of skin, nothing to scare off the Artist._

_If only I had legs._

_I need a soul for legs._

_Soon._

 

* * *

 

 

He has spent two months blending and mixing and shouting in frustration. He has thrown away so many mugs of tea and has bought more strings for his violin to replace his snapped ones than he can count. He has stayed up nights and smoked three packets of cigarettes a day and has resorted to the aides and he _cannot bring himself to breathe life into azure._

The Artist finds himself sitting in front of John.

He breathes, and feels foolish, but he cannot help it. “John,” he begins, “I’m sorry. I really am. I just can’t find the right shade. I have no idea how or why, but it’s not appearing. And I- I really thought, you know? You were going to be- you are- my best friend. You chased the grey away. You, in your endless summer and your sun and I can’t find a blue… _blue_ enough, damn it, to-”

He breathes in. For an artist, any artist, abandoning a painting is torturous. For the Artist, it’s downright unbearable. He runs a shaky hand through his hair roughly and he brings it back. There’s strands of black where he has yanked hair out.

He does not notice John, does not realize that he is moving his lips, trying to shout, to scream, to cry. He does not notice his best friend trying to reach across the canvas.

 

* * *

 

_I want to shout, I want to scream, to laugh, to move my arms._

_He hasn’t noticed I am doing all this. He still cannot hear me. I still hear him crying, he has moved away. He left. All he needs to do is paint my eyes and I can reach out. I can finally touch._

_My legs, those legs that he failed to paint, they are still sprouting. Like rosebuds. I don’t know how, I don’t care how._

_I have to climb out. It’s been months. I need to touch him. I need to touch him._ I need to touch him. I NEED TO TOUCH HIM.

* * *

 

 

It’s the bluest blue he has ever seen. It’s been seven months of failed attempts, of near over-doses and dreams that have come back with a vengeance to ravage his mind and shake his sanity. It’s been seven months of John hidden in a corner, the Artist too shame-faced and morose to even glance his way.

He has found it. He has blended indigo and violet and navy and sky blue and so many purples and blues and three different shades of pink and white.

He prays for forgiveness, he prays in gratitude. Every deity and pagan god he knows of, every saint that has been named and every saint that has yet to be named is blessed. He runs to John, careful to wipe his tears before picking up the canvas.

“John! John, I found it! It’s the blue, John. _The_ blue!” He shouts, placing the canvas on the easel and dipping his brush. He is shaking uncontrollably, and he drops the brush, wasting the _precious blue he has cried over how dare he be so stupid as to drop it_. He breathes, trying to control himself.

He doesn’t realize John is grinning, but settles as soon as the Artist straightens, wiping the brush and starting over.

The Artist has a thought. He feels silly, maybe, but still says, “I named you John. I suppose I never told you my name. It’s Sherlock. Sherlock Holmes. Pleased to meet you, Doctor John… Well, I never thought about a surname. John… John Fields? No. John… Defreese? No, god… no. John… Holmes? No, that’s not… has a nice ring to it, but no. I’ll think of it later, once I’m done painting you.”

He picks the brush up again, now that he stopped shaking.

It takes hours. The Artist is determined, fiercely determined to get the _life_ of John. He needs this. He survives on this. It has been a year, close to a year and a half, since he bought the blank canvas and began painting his soldier-friend, his comforter, his protecter, his dream-chaser. He needs this to be perfect.

It takes five hours, without taking a break so much for water, and he finally shudders a breath and lets it out in a reverent, “ _John_.”

 

* * *

 

_He’s beautiful._

_There is nothing I can say to this man, my tongue is tied. He is the first person I have seen, and the one that painted me, and the one that I fell in love with._

_I’m fully human. I can feel every breath that the Artist- Sherlock- has bestowed on me. Every touch of his brush a life force, every word that was spoken softly that I felt vibrating through me, or that I heard throughout these long months, every single touch or word is a strength in my soul and bones and veins._

_Every memory, every heartbeat, every thought flitting through my head._

_I love him. I fell in love with my maker. With my Artist._

* * *

 

 

He is finished, and he has never felt so… empty in his entire life.

“I don’t know what to do now. I’ve finished painting you. I’ve spent a year and a half in your company. I needed you, and still need you. What now?” The Artist took a breath. “John, I thought this would be enough. It’s not. John… I-” He feels foolish, telling a painting that he loves him. But still even so, “John, I love you.”

It is not a ripple effect. It isn’t an undulating wave, it isn’t a cracking and splintering effect. The Artist just watches as John- _his John that he painted and was very much just that-_ blinks.

John _blinks_ and _yawns_ and _grins_. “I’ve always liked Watson.”

The Artist gapes, mouth opened, before John reaches out to close it for him. The Artist is even more shocked at how warm John feels. Actual heat, and summer, and sun. “You’re-”

John smiles again, but his eyes are tinged with worry. The Artist thinks selfishly for a moment how human he made those eyes. John says, “Hello.” It is timid, and unsure, and scared.

The Artist swallows convulsively. “Hello. You’re alive.” He knows it is redundant and foolish to state such an obvious question, but this is not a dream, and he is not under the influence of his aides. John simply _is_. So he asks, “How?”

John shrugs, mouth downturned into a worried frown. “You painted me, and gave me a soul, and I’m here. I don’t know how, but I felt alive even before I was a person. You had a purpose for me since the moment you bought my canvas, and that, I think, helped. You smeared that first brushstroke, and I felt it. You’re my Maker, my Artist. My Sherlock.” John’s smile is warm, all teeth, even though the Artist didn’t draw teeth. The Artist grabs John’s wrist, the one that is extended still. There is a pulse.

He feels weak.

John cups his cheek with that extended hand, leaning forward slightly. The Artist tries and fails not to stiffen. “Yours are blue also. And silver, if you turn it like… that. There’s green there. Oh, I’ve waited a long time to gaze on your face. I fell in love with you from the first moment you picked me up as a blank canvas. I felt you, and you needed me just as much as I needed you. And I- I love you, okay?” John sounds worried again, and hopeful, and his eyes- those perfect, wonderful eyes that he painted are staring deeply into his, searching for… what? Answers?

The Artist swallows. He cannot believe this, and yet… he prayed for this, didn’t he? A comforter, and protector, and doctor, and friend. He has the only man that he has ever wanted. He says, “You have no legs.”

He feels like punching himself for saying that.

John grins, and there it is again, that warmth that seeps out through every pore in something the Artist feels might be relief. The Artist is so glad that he has decided to embody summer in John. “They grew along with my humanity. I can crawl out of here at any moment.”

The Artist again swallows. It seems like the only thing he is capable of doing, even thought his mouth is dry. “But what happens to the painting if you walk out?”

This is not a conversation he should be having. It’s not possible. It’s not realistic. But John shrugs, and says, “I’d like to find out.”

The Artist has to help him climb out, and help him stabilize. John is shorter than the Artist imagined, but he is the right size for an Army doctor. They both are surprised to see that the painting of John has remained, and a corporeal John stands in the room.

“John, what’s your surname?” The Artist asks after a long moment of silence, because he has not figured one out. And now that he is alive, he should have one. The legalities astoud the Artist, but he doesn’t think of that. John is turning, and smiling softly, lovingly, towards him. John- his John, the John he painted- is stepping toward him and reaching out to cup his cheek again.

His very touch warms the skin underneath, like the Artist’s own, personal sun.

“I’ve always liked Watson. It sounds nice. John Watson.” He whispers. The air is thick, and hot, and the Artist can’t breathe right, and he can finally breathe again, and it feels too warm and not warm enough and he just wants more.

He loves his creation, his painting, this man that he made. He loves John, and John loves him. He smiles softly back, and John’s eyes light up. It hurts the Artist’s soul, knowing that those eyes took seven months to create and five hours to paint and it was _all worth it because they are so beautiful and he is beautiful and it hurts to see so much and there is no more winter and no more grey._

“Pleased to meet you, John Hamish Watson,” he whispers back, reaching out to touch and revelling in being touched and wanting to cry with the perfection of it all.

John’s eyebrow shoots up, and he smirks. Even that is perfect. He asks, “Hamish?”

The Artist shrugs, pulling him closer, closer, needing to be protected and touched and loved. “It suits you. I like it.”

John’s grin makes him grin. “I love it. I’m John Hamish Watson, and I am meeting for the first time, the man I have fallen in love with. I’m very pleased to meet you, Sherlock Holmes.”

The Artist kisses him then, and it’s better than he imagined long ago, when he first painted those lips. It’s warm and pliant and the tongue that he didn’t paint but is very much there is warmer and soft and probing and curious and the Artist lets himself shed tears, and John kisses those away.

The Artist wants to paint. Needs to paint.

He needs to paint this moment. He needs to paint every memory.

 

There are no more dreams.

There is no need for the aides anymore.

John brings him tea in the morning and lies with him at night.

And the Artist loves him.

And he loves the Artist.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much for reading this! As my first fanfic, it was daunting to write something AU, but it was a blast writing and I hope you enjoyed reading. I feel like some of it was OOC, but I'm okay with how it turned out.   
> Reviews, comments, and critiques are welcomed and appreciated!


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